Format: NES
Release: 1991 (US), 1992 (UK)
Publisher: Camerica/Codemasters (US), Codemasters (UK)
Developer: In-house

Formed by the Darling family – father Jim and siblings David and Richard – in the latter half of 1986, Codemasters originally acquired a modest reputation as a purveyor of cheap, cheerful and oft-forgettable ‘budget’ software for home computers. During 1989, however, the company began to undergo a quiet metamorphosis. Like the Stamper brothers at Rare, the Darlings wished to turn their attention to the fantastically successful NES market. A gifted employee called Ted Carron began work on two devices that would change the company’s fortunes: the ‘Power Pak’, a peripheral that would allow players to enter cheat codes for NES games and, apropos of Codemasters’ intention to avoid Nintendo’s hideously expensive licensing program, a prototype NES development kit.

“At the time it wasn’t easy to get a licence and we didn’t need one, so we went ahead without it,” explains creative director Richard Darling. “We produced our own development systems and began development of our own games. The hardest part was finding a way to get around the protection system on the NES, so that our games would not be treated as ‘counterfeit’.”

In April 1989, coder Andrew Graham – then working on a computer science degree at the University of Strathclyde – was commissioned to port an old Oliver twins game to the NES. “I had been doing some conversions for them on the C64, Amiga and ST in my spare time at university, and they asked me if I wanted to do an NES game,” he recalls. “I converted Treasure Island Dizzy using Codies’ home-made development system. Ted Carron had made a rather Heath Robinson development system which consisted of a PC connected to a Commodore 64 connected to a box full of wires and electronics, all hooked up to a consumer NES. They mailed the whole lot up to me in Scotland. It was a miracle it all worked when I put it together. His subsequent NES dev kits were altogether more compact. They were given code names from characters in Blade Runner. I think one of them was called Leon, or something.”



Looking back, Graham suggests that his port of Treasure Island Dizzy might have been – by design or through a later change of heart – something of a dry run for Codemasters’ NES ambitions. Indeed, it only received a release years later, as one of four games on a package called Quattro Adventure. However, Graham’s efforts as a freelance led to an offer that would prove extraordinarily fruitful for the Darlings: they asked him to take a year out to write an NES title.

The young programmer began work on his first original game – California Buggy Boys, an NES racing game with a top-down perspective – during October 1989. “A lot of the graphics were done – you were racing along a beach and across the dunes,” Graham recalls. “The cars were the same kind of buggies that appeared in Power Drift – I loved that game. I just liked the whole kind of sunshiney happy-happy fun theme to it. They were specifically looking for something that would go down well in America, hence California Buggy Boys, I guess. We had a number of games in development. Gavin Raeburn, now a very successful studio head at Codies, did an arcadey racing shoot ’em up called Ultimate Stuntman, and the Oliver twins put a lot of work into what was probably the biggest and best of their Dizzy games, The Fantastic Adventures Of Dizzy. There were others as well.”

Inadvertently, it was Ted Carron’s Power Pak that led to the demise of California Buggy Boys. Renamed the Game Genie by David Darling – as players could insert three codes, or ‘wishes’, at a time – Carron’s project led to an opportunity for Codemasters, and, in turn, a change of direction for Graham’s racing game. “We had started working with Galoob Toys in San Francisco when they licensed the Game Genie from us,” explains Darling. “Their biggest line of toys was the Micro Machines range, and so it was an obvious match. We really liked the idea of adapting the game to be based on the toys, as this gave the game a really unique feel – being based on miniature cars racing in everyday real-world locations.”

“It made sense to exploit this well-known brand, rather than launching the totally unknown California Buggy Boys,” concedes Graham. “I remember it took a while to get used to the idea that my game was now about these plasticky little toys, rather than full-sized buggies on beaches, though.”